Saturday, August 3, 2013

Summer movies

(originally published in The
Outreach Connection in July 2009)

Theoretically, Sam Mendes’ Away
We Go is the kind of project I like, seeming to be trying to diagnose life
as we have to live it here and now. It’s about a couple in their early
thirties, in love and expecting their first child, but afraid something
fundamental has passed them by – how to be adults, with the roots and
infrastructure and emotional contours that seems to mean. In the new online
economy they can work from anywhere, so they set out on a trip to find a base,
visiting friends and family members in Arizona and Wisconsin and Montreal and
Miami, hoping somewhere might stick. It’s patriotically pleasing to note that
Montreal will come out a clear winner in the eyes of most viewers, if not
necessarily those of the protagonists.

Away
We Go

Mind you, that’s partly because most of the people they meet
elsewhere are somewhere between deranged and grotesque, whereas the couple in
Montreal are merely sadder than they first appear. This extremely episodic
film, co-written by the high-profile Dave Eggers, has some easy laughs, but
it’s bewildering what we’re meant to take away from it. The day afterwards, I
rewatched Preston Sturges’ 1942 comedy The
Palm Beach Story, a remarkably sustained wife-on-the-run creation,
populated with one of the all-time great assemblies of severe eccentrics.
Sturges’ film remains a milestone, partly because it seems like a coherent (if
super-heightened) angle on aggression and sexuality. As usual, I know it’s
hardly fair to judge new releases by hall-of-fame standards (although then
again Mendes is, let’s recall, an acclaimed Oscar-winning director), but the
comparison helps coalesce how Away We Go
never amounts to much more than a freak show. The ultimate proof comes with the
ending, which seems arbitrary at best, and won’t strike most viewers as being
particularly plausible, or relevant, or meaningful.

Maya Rudolph, best known for her broad sketch-work on Saturday Night Live, is more interesting
in the female lead than I expected, but John Krasinski as her partner sticks to
a single wide-eyed note. The other actors lay down a few crumbs at best. I
wrote earlier this year that Mendes’ last film, Revolutionary Road, seemed removed and academic and, in terms of
evoking its 1950’s setting, oddly empty. Much the same applies here; Mendes
just doesn’t seem like much of a cinematic thinker, when you come right down to
it. There’s no reason to see this film - find something vaguely adult to do
instead.

Up

Which raises the question, does Pete Docter’s Up, the latest Pixar wonder, qualify as such a worthwhile adult
pursuit? The critics are lining up, as they did with Wall-E last year, to stamp it as one of the year’s best. I do
think, with some regret, that digital animation is now almost the surest source
of the sort of out of the box daring that used to belong to the major auteurs.
You marvel throughout at its immense self-confidence, and the availability of
its resources.

As you likely know, it’s built around an old widower, missing his
wife and regretting they never achieved their great dream of moving to the epic
Paradise Falls in South America; when he’s faced with being shunted into a rest
home, he uses his knowledge of (and obviously access to!) balloons to lift his
house from its foundations and soar away from it all. Along with a stowaway
(and presumably the cooperation of an inattentive US air force, and a week off
for the laws of physics) he makes it down south in no time, to an adventure
involving a long-lost explorer, a rare giant bird, and a large pack of talking
dogs. This last element generates many of the best laughs, while underlining
the film’s rather audacious navigating between high and low concepts.

It’s great to watch, and I’d rather this be the year’s official
best film than say Slumdog Millionaire
(the success of which rather depressed me), but I wouldn’t be able to maintain
my enthusiasm for the artform if I really believed it was that. I admire Up in the same way that I admire the
iphone – it’s a triumph of human creativity, but surely more technological than
aesthetic…or rather, in both cases, the technological achievement becomes
polished to an extent that art as we traditionally think of it starts to look
trivial. But in my own dire view of things, this is one of the more benign
aspects of the overall degradation that’s made us into the debt-ridden,
unsustainable, complacent collective monstrosity we are; the more we advance on
some fronts, the less aware we are of what’s eroding on others.

Up is a nice
take on how it’s never too late to change and all that kind of thing, but for
all its sophistication, it remains a kids’ film, in that kids needn’t take on
any responsibility for grappling with the world’s real issues. Adults ought to
though.

Departures

Another depressing thing about last year’s Oscars, to some, was
the surprise foreign film victory of Japan’s Departures, beating The Class
and Waltz with Bashir. At the time,
hardly anyone outside the tiny pool of Oscar voters had seen, or barely even
registered, the movie, but now it’s been released, and generally slammed as
mediocre. It’s not an unfair judgment, since the film’s instincts and
approaches are utterly conventional. It’s the story of a cellist who loses his
Tokyo orchestra gig and retreats back to his childhood town, where he takes a job
preparing the dead for burial. In its classic form, this is a highly
ritualistic, and again aesthetic pursuit, seeking to capture the person’s inner
truth and beauty while rendering them immaculate.

The story is a mere dawdle, shamelessly embracing various clichés
and soft choices. But I have to tell you, I was in tears for a good half hour
of it. A huge chunk of the film simply involves the protagonist and his aging
master practicing their art, as the bereaved family looks on, and it’s classic
identification mechanics – as they become wrapped up in the ceremony and get
weepy, so do you. And compared to the somewhat meaningless high-concepts I
mentioned, there’s something refreshing about the film’s clarity and focus: the
devotion to the dead in their final passage isn’t primarily a matter of
mysticism or superstition, but a sharpening of the obligations of being left
behind. The character is portrayed initially as such a goofball that his inner
evolution doesn’t carry the weight it should, but through sheer doggedness
maybe, the movie hits its targets. I wish it were better, but it’s still the
most mature and meaningful thing I have for you this week.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).